Why? | Goals | Status | Getting started | Join us
See our announcement video from CppNorth. Note that Carbon is not ready for use.
Fast and works with C++
- Performance matching C++ using LLVM, with low-level access to bits and addresses
- Interoperate with your existing C++ code, from inheritance to templates
- Fast and scalable builds that work with your existing C++ build systems
Modern and evolving
- Solid language foundations that are easy to learn, especially if you have used C++
- Easy, tool-based upgrades between Carbon versions
- Safer fundamentals, and an incremental path towards a memory-safe subset
Welcoming open-source community
- Clear goals and priorities with robust governance
- Community that works to be welcoming, inclusive, and friendly
- Batteries-included approach: compiler, libraries, docs, tools, package manager, and more
C++ remains the dominant programming language for performance-critical software, with massive and growing codebases and investments. However, it is struggling to improve and meet developers' needs, as outlined above, in no small part due to accumulating decades of technical debt. Incrementally improving C++ is extremely difficult, both due to the technical debt itself and challenges with its evolution process. The best way to address these problems is to avoid inheriting the legacy of C or C++ directly, and instead start with solid language foundations like modern generics system, modular code organization, and consistent, simple syntax.
Existing modern languages already provide an excellent developer experience: Go, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, and many more. Developers that can use one of these existing languages should. Unfortunately, the designs of these languages present significant barriers to adoption and migration from C++. These barriers range from changes in the idiomatic design of software to performance overhead.
Carbon is fundamentally a successor language approach